1. Statement of the Technical Field
The present invention relates to the field of page sharing and more particularly to the distribution of page imagery during an application sharing session between a multiplicity of application viewers.
2. Description of the Related Art
The rapid development of the Internet has led to advanced modes of communication and collaboration. Using the Internet as a backbone, individuals worldwide can converge in cyberspace to share ideas, documents and images in a manner not previously possible through conventional telephony and video conferencing. To facilitate collaboration over the Internet, a substantial collection of technologies and protocols have been assembled to effectively deliver audio, video and data over the single data communications medium of the Internet. These technologies include instant messaging, Web conferencing, and application sharing.
In conventional application sharing, an application host can distribute imagery of an application operating in the host to one or more application viewers distributed about the computer communications network. The imagery can include not only the pages rendered in association with the operation of the shared application, but also the visual presentation of mouse pointer movements and the like. Generally, speaking, however, the imagery can include only discrete “snap-shots” of the actual display of the operating application in the host system. In this way, the application viewers can be given the appearance of sharing an application, though each viewer merely views a shadow rendering of only a portion of the operation of the shared application.
Once a page has been captured and converted for transmission to coupled clients, the page can be compressed prior to its transmission to the coupled clients. The resulting compressed form of the page subsequently can be transmitted to the coupled clients so as to conserve bandwidth and to provide enhanced application performance. Still, if a page in a shared application incorporates complex graphics, the complex graphics will not compress as well as the remaining content of the page.
Additionally, pages which incorporate multiple, different graphics file formats have proven to be problematic in achieving favorable compression ratios. Finally, in many cases, the network throughput can be a limiting factor. Thus, as it will be apparent to the skilled artisan, application sharing can place a disproportionate stress on the resources of network components.